


Non Vitae Sed Scholae

by UniverseOnHerShoulders



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Coal Hill School, Depression, Episode: s08e11-12 Dark Water/Death in Heaven, Episode: s09e10 Face the Raven, F/M, Gen, Loss, POV Multiple, whouffaldi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-10
Updated: 2016-09-10
Packaged: 2018-08-14 05:43:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8000722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UniverseOnHerShoulders/pseuds/UniverseOnHerShoulders
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In literary terms, the relationship between the students and the teachers of Coal Hill School could best be described as "love/hate," a constant cycle of detention, pranks, and punishments that seems interminable. Yet as the students watch a love story unfurl in front of them, they find themselves drawn into it inescapably as observers, captivated by the effect it has on both participants, and lulled into good behaviour. When the summer arrives, however, they bear witness to a tragedy, and find themselves faced with an English teacher with a broken heart. Moved by her suffering, they try their best to remind her of the good left in the world... only to discover that death has not finished with Coal Hill.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Non Vitae Sed Scholae

**Author's Note:**

> This idea has been buzzing around in my head for several days now, after seeing [this post](http://strikingtwelves.co.vu/post/149899034621/but-honestly-poor-coal-hill-first-danny-then) on Tumblr. I was unsure how to write it - I'm not great at first person - until I remembered _The Virgin Suicides_ and Jeffrey Eugenides' narrative choice, and thus this came about.
> 
> The title means "we learn not for life, but for school-time," and is a quote by Seneca the Younger.

**"Disce quasi semper victurus, vive quasi cras moriturus."**

**"** Learn as if always going to live; live as if tomorrow going to die."  
****

We watched them fall in love with each other incrementally. The both of them oblivious to our hundreds of eyes as their love story played out on a stage they were not sufficiently self-aware to realise they were on. They were not wilfully ignorant and they did not seek to stigmatise us in branding us incapable of noticing – rather they did not envisage the way that they burned so brightly for each other that we would have been unable to overlook their love. No phones and no reality shows could have blinded us to the white-hot way he looked at her as though he was the centre of her universe, or the way her mouth quirked up in that a rare half-smile when he called her _Miss Oswald._  

Of course, amongst ourselves we mocked them a little for it – teachers having lives? Teachers should not exist outside the realm of the school, and teachers certainly shouldn’t do things like fall in love with each other. The thought of them engaging in anything beyond chaste kissing – anything approaching the awkward pawing and fumbling that serves as a mark of affection at our age – was enough to make some giggle and some gag, although we watched the way they looked at each other and felt certain of what they were doing behind closed doors. And so we teased them in fits and starts, in stolen words and essay topics and comments muttered under our breath on the way out of the classroom. We daubed messages on walls with the same four words rehashed in our many handwritings: _Ozzie loves the Squaddie._ It was not malicious – far from it, it became a colloquialism, an expression of love – and yet our words were wind to them. Our words did not touch them, so intently focused upon each other were they as the passage of time unspooled. 

Yet then came the caretaker – brown coat and eyebrows that could take bottle tops off, with his curious ways – and we watched Miss Oswald lose her cool for the first time. We watched her look to Mr Pink with concern in her eyes, watched the way she looked between the two men, and for the first time we understood that adults are a mystery we can never hope to discern. Because she looked at one as she looked at the other, without discrimination, and we realised that Miss Oswald was not all we had anticipated her to be. Still she clung to her soldier’s hand, though – still in the corridors she would smile at him bashfully, her cheeks turning pink as she passed him; still they would disappear together at noon with their lunches neatly bagged in their hands, and the more bold of us would make jibes once they had left. Miss Oswald was in lurrrrrrrve. Miss Oswald was doing kissing with Mr Pink at lunch. A few of us coloured with jealousy at the thought of kissing Miss Oswald, and waxed lyrical on the notion until Mr Dunlop caught us. A detention later, and those fantasies were confined to the silent, personal sphere.

Although we were young and did not purport to know of love, we knew one thing: love was supposed to make you happy. We did not understand, therefore, why there were days when the two teachers could barely look at each other, why there were days that Miss Oswald could not and would not look at the squaddie. There were days she would only sit at her desk and chew her lip, biting the colour away whilst we read in silence, but we were not interested in _Pride and Prejudice,_ nor _Mansfield Park._ We were interested in her. She was a teacher, certainly, but she was kind and she was good, and she helped us in a way that other teachers were wont not to do. She was mad, and she was a thousand miles a minute, and she was tinier than even some of the very shortest of us, but she was ours. She was ours, and to watch her distance from us was to worry about her as acutely as we worried about our own. We would be compelled – on those days, on the days where the sadness about her was tangible – to misbehave a little, so that she might shout, words tumbling from her half-unpainted mouth as she sent us out of the classroom, and in the corridor we would smile secretly at each other in congratulation for provoking her back into the land of the living. 

One of us heard the news first. Heard of an accident by word of mouth, and knew of the location; peddled down there idly to investigate a local curiosity and saw from a distance what was unfurling. Miss Oswald, frozen in place, tears tracking down her cheeks as people swarmed around her. Miss Oswald, falling to her knees on the sun-warmed tarmac and screaming as though her heart was breaking. Understanding striking in a wave as paramedics tried to help her to her feet, eventually scooping her into their arms and carrying her away to mourn in private. There was a sudden feeling of intrusion, of having seen something not meant for our eyes. 

“Mr Pink has been hit by a car and Miss Oswald was crying and crying and I think it’s really bad”

The text circulated among us faster than wildfire, the use of their proper titles enough to convey the seriousness of the matter. We are the young, we are the technological generation, and our fingers hovered over the refresh button of websites and social networks as we waited for news. We wept as one when it was confirmed. Looked at the grainy photo and felt sick enough to decline our dinners. Went to our rooms and looked down at the homework we were supposed to be giving back to him tomorrow morning. Threw things and cried as we understood acutely for the first time that death is not only for the old and the sick, but rather that death can happen to anyone at any time: young or old, touched by love or in their prime – death does not discriminate. We raged against the dying of the light that evening, raged against the injustice that had befallen Miss Oswald, and on Monday morning we went – in small groups, in dribs and drabs – to local shops and bought flowers inexpertly, fumbling over the colours and the types, sacrificing our pocket money for something far bigger to us than chocolate or magazines. We bore the blooms into school in our arms, unwilling as we were to go to the site of the accident, unwilling to face the place he died and be reminded of our own mortality, and thus we stepped into his classroom and laid the flowers down upon his desk, a carpet of white and yellow and pink that hid the scars he had carved into the wood during idle classes. 

We had not expected her to be there. We had expected her to be at home with those she loved, safely ensconced away from the place where memories of him had permeated the very fabric of the building. Yet when we heard her heels and saw her anger, saw her hands flapping us away from his room, we did not flee. We were compelled to hold our ground as she took in the flowers, took in the small notes we had written the night before, the tragedy raw in our minds. We would find more eloquent words later on, but for now the words were succinct. _I’m sorry. We will miss you. You were the best. I’m sorry I was so rubbish at Maths._  

Her hands came up to her face and she looked around at us, tears misting her eyes. One of us considered embracing her, but she turned sharply and ran before we could do so. We knew that what we wanted to convey had been conveyed. We knew that she understood, in that moment, that we cared about them both deeply, and that his loss was an acute sense of pain. 

When they called us into the assembly hall, it was to deliver information we already knew. Miss Oswald had – we were told – gone home. She had been his _close friend._ That was enough to incense us. That was enough to enrage us – the demeaning of what they had shared to nothing more than the bond between any two of us? No, that was wrong, and we said so, loudly and with the pounding of feet, until the headmaster backtracked and bowed his head, clearly struggling in his role as the bearer of macabre news. Miss Oswald would be away for a week or so, he told us, and we could see the empathy etched on his face. We understood. We knew that she had tried, and we silently acknowledged her bravery. 

When the time came for the school’s memorial service, many of us got up to speak. Some of us spoke of his kindness and his compassion, others of his ability to help others grasp things that had evaded them for many years. All of us recognised him to be a good man, a gentle man, and we spoke as one of our shared heartache, hundreds of us weeping as one entity in that cramped, hot school hall. It was not until the end that we saw Miss Oswald, silent and half-hidden at the back of the room, her eyes resolutely dry as she watched us speak, watched us honour him, watched us mourn. One of us made eye contact with her, and in that moment there was a warm spark of gratitude between them. _Thank you for honouring him. Thank you for being here to honour him at our side._   

When she returned to us properly, we were unsurprised to find her changed. She was withdrawn and unsure of herself, second-guessing every instruction and every homework assignment. She jumped when spoken to and marked our work with boundless praise and high marks we were certain were not earned – high marks that we would have celebrated, were it not for the way we saw her pen tremor as it danced over the page. Her eyes were hollow and her words were quiet, and our hearts ached to look at her as we witnessed the brush of death on the life of someone we cared about in our own way, and thus each day came to be a mission to make her smile. It became an honour to earn her smile – it was not easily produced, and when it came it was haunted, but it was enough to make us feel warm inside, to know that we had achieved something good for a woman who was putting herself back together in fits and starts.

The summer came – the long, hot summer, unbearably interminable in its passage – and when we returned to school we found a Miss Oswald who we thought had been consigned to our memories. Her reticence and hesitation was gone as she danced around the classroom, a smile now etched onto her face with permanence as she enthused at a million miles an hour over Jane Austen and made odd remarks that we chalked up to a touch of the sun. _Jane Austen… a phenomenal kisser?_ Those amongst us who had once lusted after Miss Oswald did not even have it in themselves to smirk as her remark jarred the silence of the classroom. She was odd, that much we had always known. But this seemed odder than before.

She would arrive in class sweating slightly, panting and on the edge of being out of breath. Some amongst us began to smirk then, reverting back to old ways, but some of tilted our heads fractionally and gauged the sadness hidden in her eyes, empathised with what we knew she was going through. Those of us who understood gathered together in the quiet darkness of the park one evening and discussed it: discussed that desire to live life on the edge, and knew what it symbolised. We felt our hearts meld into one as we recognised her reckless streak and we took it upon ourselves to do small things for her – small things to ground her, to remind her of what she had. Anonymous flowers. Slices of cake. Going above and beyond on our homework. Small things to remind her that she mattered to us, to remind her of who she had been once. She was beauty, she was grace, and she was wild – we did not seek to tame her in the wake of her grief, but we sought to remind her of the world of order she had once known. 

Yet the inescapable fact remained. 

Miss Oswald had been touched by death. Death had reached its long fingers into her life and taken first her mother – so we learned, _after_ – and then Mr Pink, and death had beckoned to her with an enticing smile. 

She was dead. 

The words rang in our ears as we sat in the assembly hall that dreary November day, crammed together as the information settled over us like a dark cloud. 

Passed away in her sleep. Peaceful, unexpected, sudden.

Those of us who _knew_ exchanged looks. Contemplated whether what we had offered her had not been enough to ground her to this world, wondered if perhaps we were to blame. We attempted to digest the lie – for we knew it to be a lie, in our own way, knew that Miss Oswald was not the type to greet death lying down, not the type to quietly take him by the hand – as we felt our hearts still. She had burned too brightly for this world. She had burned too brightly, and the stars had taken her for their own. 

We are not stupid. We may be classed as such, we may be beaten down, but when it came down to the bare bones of the matter – we knew we were being lied to. We were not the children with no futures that society had deemed us to be. Miss Oswald had believed in us, Miss Oswald had given us something more to be, and now she was gone and they were lying to us. With each passing minute, the platitudes that spilled from the headmaster’s mouth seemed more and more trite. He did not understand her. He did not know her. He had fought with her on occasion, and we had watched her clash with him, unencumbered by fear. He had no right to speak these words.

We stood as one movement. Three hundred of us, moving as one. We walked from the hall with our hands linked together, moving to the tarmac of the playground where we could be at one with the skies that had come to represent her freedom of spirit. There was solitary bunch of flowers propped beneath the school noticeboard – a single bouquet that would become a flood, a river of outpourings of grief and loss and tributes in the days to come – and we congregated before it, bowing our heads in a gesture of solidarity.

She was gone. 

We had loved her as one, and she was gone. 

The teachers could not stem the flow of our grief. We felt their sorrow pulsing alongside ours, raw and unchecked as we mourned her in the silence of the cold November day. We thought of her together – thought of her how she was, young and in love, smiling, offering a stolen hug to those in need of her comfort – and felt our hearts break in unison. Three hundred hearts might have been a billion, such was the magnitude of the loss we felt in that moment. 

So it was that some weeks later, we found ourselves waking early. Earlier than school, earlier than even the sunrise, moving sluggishly as we fought to remember why we had made the choice we had made. We slipped from our houses in the darkness before the dawn, and we met at the start of our journey, watching trains roaring away into the ether as we stamped our feet against the cold and exchanged early-morning greetings. 

“Ready?” one of us asked, and we nodded collectively as we stepped onto the platform. Afraid. Bold. Enlivened by our daring. Not all of us – most too afraid and thus willing to allow a small contingent to represent the whole – but enough to know we would be recognised. 

It was not until we arrived in the bracing salty air and faded seaside glamour of her home town that we felt the first twinges of uncertainty in our course of action. We knew what we should do, we knew what we owed her, but still we felt fear as we boarded the bus that would take us to her final resting place. We clenched our hands tight against our bags, knuckles white as we fought to remember how to breathe. When we disembarked, we were greeted with a silence that hurt our ears, found not the peeling façade of the seafront but the quiet stillness of the suburbs, a church stood before us that only dimly resembled its London counterparts. 

We stepped into the still interior together, our paces matched subconsciously. More than half the pews were full of people about _her_ age – young, vibrant, yet sombrely dressed in a shade of black we knew she would have found horrifying. She was not monochrome – she was vivid, she was brightness personified – and yet the assembled mourners represented black and white and a thousand shades of grey that fell between. They were clutching each other, they were weeping, they were confused by us, but they were not our concern. 

Our attention was drawn forwards. There at the front was a man bowed double by the weight of his grief, clutching the pew for support. Beside him sat an elderly lady who stared ahead with unseeing eyes, occasionally patting his back and murmuring platitudes we could not hear. We offered our silent prayers to him, joined hands and steeled ourselves to pass both him and the tangible burden of his bereavement. 

We raised our eyes then to the coffin, and felt our hearts still. She was there. For the first time in the longest time, she was with us – and yet the room was devoid of the warmth of her presence, or the joy of her smile. We were beside her, but she could not have been further away. As we approached – our steps measured, our breathing synchronised as we felt her loss consume us once more – the eyes of the mourners turned to us and the wreath we bore with young hands already familiar with loss, and as we stood before her coffin and bowed our heads, we offered her our carefully chosen words:

“Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”


End file.
